Bedwyn: One Night For Love Part 7

She nodded again.

"It has been a difficult day for you," he said. "Perhaps tomorrow will be easier."

"Do you love her?" she couldn't help but blurt out. She stared at him, wis.h.i.+ng she could recall the words, wis.h.i.+ng she could stop herself from feeling hurt that the answer might be yes. All the time she had been with Manuel and the partisans, clinging to the hope of one day returning to the man who had married her, he had been courting another woman, perhaps falling in love with her. All the time she had been making her difficult journey, with only the thought of reaching him sustaining her, he had been planning a marriage with someone else.

He clasped his hands at his back and regarded her gravely. "We grew up together," he said. "She lived here at the abbey with us. Her mother is married to my uncle, my father's brother, but Lauren was the child of a previous marriage. We were intended for each other from infancy. I have always been very fond of her. After my return from the Peninsula a marriage between us seemed the logical step to take."

"You were promised to someone else when you married me?" she asked him.

"No," he said. "Not really. I was rebelling against my lot in life. Even we privileged aristocrats do that, Lily. I had advised her not to wait for me."

"Was I part of your rebellion, then?" she asked him, realizing that there could surely not be a more magnificent snub to his former life, to his parents, than marrying a sergeant's daughter.

"No, Lily." He was frowning at her. "No, you were not. I married you because there was a need to do so, because I had made a promise to your father. And because I wanted to."

Yes. It was true. She must not start to believe that there had been any cynicism in his choice of her. He had married her because he was a kind and honorable man. And because he had wanted to. What did that mean?

"But all the time you remained fond of her," she said.

"Yes, Lily."

It had not escaped her notice that he had not really answered her original question. Did he love the woman called Lauren'? Did he realize now what a dreadful mistake he had made in marrying her even though he had wanted to in a moment of impulse?

"And today you would have married her," she said.

"Yes." He had not looked away from her. "I have known her all my life, Lily. She waited for me. My father died and I returned to my responsibilities here. One of my duties was to marry so that the abbey would have a countess. And to beget children, in particular an heir. My life of rebellion was over. And you were dead."

"You told no one about me." It was not a question. She turned and touched the silky brocade of the bed hangings. So heavy and so rich. So alien to anything she had ever known in her life. She wished she had remained in Portugal. She did not know what she would have done there, but she wished she had not come back. Perhaps she could have clung to part of the dream ...

"Lily," he said as if he was reading her thoughts, "I mourned you deep in the privacy of my own heart. I am not sorry you survived. I am not, my dear. How could I be?"

No, he was a kind man. He had always treated her with gentleness and courtesy, even when she had been a girl and must sometimes have seemed an irrelevance at best, a nuisance at worst. Of course he would never wish her dead even though her survival had set an obstacle in the smooth path of his future.

"It was not because I did not care that I never mentioned you here," he said. "It was not because I did not care about you that I was to marry Lauren this morning, only a year and a half after your-your death. Please believe me."

She did. Yes, he had cared. Enough to marry her. Enough to murmur those endearments to her on their wedding night. Enough to mourn her. But if he had died, she thought, she would have mourned him for the rest of her life. She would never, could never ... But how could she know for sure? Who was she to judge? Meanwhile there was an obstacle even more insuperable than the fact that he was the Earl of Kilbourne while she was the former Lily Doyle.

"I-" She swallowed. "You know what happened to me in Spain, do you not? You did understand this morning?"

She could feel him staring at her for a long time as her hands played with the braided fringe of the curtain. "Was it one man, Lily?" he asked. "Or many?"

"One." Manuel, the leader. Small, wiry, darkly handsome Manuel, who ruled his band of partisans through daring and charisma and occasional intimidation. "I have not been true to you."

"It was rape," he said harshly.

"I-I never fought," she told him. "I said no a number of times and was quite determined to-to die rather than submit, but when it came to the point I did not fight." It was a burden on her conscience that she had not fought her captor more strenuously.

"Look at me, Lily," he said in the quiet, authoritative voice of the major she had known. She looked unwillingly into his eyes. "Why did you not fight?"

"There were the French prisoners," she began. Her breath was coming in short gasps as she tried not to remember what had happened to them. "Because I was afraid. So afraid. Because I was a coward."

"Lily." He was still using the same voice. His eyes were looking very directly into hers, making it impossible for her to look away. He was her commanding officer again suddenly, not her husband. "It was rape. You were not a coward. It is a soldier's duty to survive any way he can in captivity-and you were a soldier's daughter and a soldier's wife. There is no question of cowardice. It was rape. It was not adultery. Adultery demands consent."

Neville sounded so certain, so sure of what he was saying. Could it possibly be true? She was not a coward? Not an adulteress?

"Let me hold you," he said softly. He was using a different voice now. "You look so very lonely, Lily."

A woman come home to a world that was alien to her and to a husband who had been about to marry someone else. How abject was it possible to feel? Would she never have herself back again, the serene, confident, happy self she remembered, the self who had somehow got lost after her one night of love?

She hunched her shoulders and looked down at her hands. When he came to stand in front of her and took her upper arms in his hands and drew her against him, she relaxed for a while, turning her head to rest against his shoulder, feeling the warmth and the strength of him all along her body. She allowed herself the luxury of feeling safe, of feeling cherished, of feeling that she had come home. He smelled good-of musk and soap and pure masculinity.

Yet she felt like someone who has arrived at the end of the rainbow only to find that there is nothing there after all-no pot of gold, not; even the shreds of the rainbow itself. Just ... nothing. And no more faith in rainbows. Only the core of herself with which to build a new ident.i.ty, a new life.

She drew back from him before she could get lost in a dependency that would just not do.

"It would have been better for us both," she said, "if I had died."

"No, Lily." He spoke sharply.

"Can you tell me," she asked him, "that it has not once crossed your mind in the past year and a half that it was better so?"

She paused only briefly, but it did not escape her notice that he did not rush in with any denial.

"I think," she said, "if I had lived-if you had known I lived-you would not have brought me here. You would have found some excuse to keep me far away. You would have been kind about it. You would have explained that it was for my own good, and you would have been right. But you would not have brought me here."

"Lily." He had walked to one of the windows and was standing staring out into the darkness. "You cannot know that. I cannot know it. I do not know what would have happened. You were my wife. You were-dear to me."

Ah, she was dear to him. Not the love of his heart he had called her that night? Lily smiled bleakly and sat on the side of the bed, her arms hugging herself against the chill of the evening.

"I believe," she said, "this is an impossibility. To say I am out of place here is so obvious that it is laughable. She is not out of place, is she? Lauren? She has been brought up to all this and to being your wife and your countess. Instead she has been made miserable, your future is in ruins, and I ... Well."

"Lily." He had come back to her, stooped down on his haunches before her, and taken both her hands in his. "Nothing is impossible. Listen to yourself. Is this Lily Doyle speaking? Lily Doyle, who marched the length and breadth of the Peninsula, undaunted by the heat of summer, the bitter cold of winter, the dangers of battle and ambush, the discomforts and diseases of camp? Lily Doyle, who always had a smile and a cheerful word for everyone? Who saw beauty in the dreariest surroundings? There is nothing impossible that you of all people cannot make possible. And I will help you. We freely joined our lives together on that hillside in Portugal. We must soldier on, Lily. We have no alternative. I am not sure I would even wish for one."

She did not know if she could resurrect that old Lily. But she warmed to his faith in her.

"Perhaps," she said, smiling wanly, "I am just tired and dispirited. Perhaps everything will look brighter in the morning. It has been a difficult day for both of us. Thank you for your kindness. You really have been kind."

"You would rather be alone?" he asked her. "I will stay and hold you through the night if you need the comfort, Lily. I will not press other attentions on you."

It was tempting. It would be so very easy to relax permanently into his kindness and his strength and become as abject in a way as she had been with Manuel. But somehow if she was going to find a way to cope with this new, frightening, impossible life, she must not give in to a need for the comfort of his arms-especially when she did not want more than that from him.

"I would rather be alone," she said.

He squeezed her hands before releasing them and getting to his feet. "Good night, then," he said. "If you should need me, tonight or any other night, my dressing room adjoins yours and my bedchamber is beyond that. If you need anything else, the bell pull is beside your bed. Your maid will answer it."

"Thank you," she said. "Good night."

She wondered suddenly how his intended bride-Lauren-was feeling tonight. Did she love him? Lily felt genuinely sorry for her, caught in a situation in which she was entirely innocent and totally helpless. This was to have been her wedding night, but Lily was in the countess's room instead of her.

Everything was so very wrong.

8.

Lily had slept too much during the daytime. She dozed fitfully through the night, and two separate times she was awakened by the same dream-the old nightmare. It was always exactly the same in every detail.

Manuel was on top of her while she lay beneath him, and then she opened her eyes to see him-Major Newbury, Neville-standing in the doorway of the hut, watching. There was that look on his face that she had seen there sometimes immediately after battle, a hard, cold, battle-mad, almost inhuman look, and his white-knuckled hand was on the hilt of his sword. He was about to kill Manuel and rescue her. Hope soared painfully as she tried to lie still so as not to alert Manuel.

The dream always proceeded the same way. After standing there, white-faced and immobile for endless moments, he turned away and disappeared, and precious minutes were lost to her while Manuel took his pleasure of her.

In the dream she was free to run after Neville as soon as Manuel was finished with her, but her legs were always too weak to carry her at any speed and the air was too thick to move through. She had no voice with which to call to him, and she could never see where he had gone, which direction he had taken. There was always mist swirling about and panic immobilizing her. And then-the cruelest part of the dream-the mist suddenly cleared and there he was, only a few steps away, standing still, his back to her.

In the dream she always stopped too at that moment, afraid to proceed, afraid to reach out to him, afraid of what would be in his eyes if he turned. It was the most dreaded moment of the dream and almost its final moment, when she touched the terrifying depths of despair. For during that second of indecision, the mist swirled again and he disappeared, not to be seen again.

She dreamed the nightmare twice during the first night at Newbury Abbey.

She rose when it was still dark, made up her bed, washed in cold water in the dressing room, and clothed herself in her old blue cotton dress. She had to get outside where she could breathe. She did not stop to pick up a bonnet or to pull on her old shoes. She had to feel the good earth beneath her feet. She had to feel the air against her face and in her hair. She met no one on her way downstairs or while she did battle with the heavy bolts on the front doors.

Eventually she was outside, where there was the merest suggestion of dawn in the eastern sky. She breathed in deep lungfuls of chilly air. She felt it raise gooseb.u.mps on her bare arms and begin to numb her feet. She was immediately calmed and set out for the beach.

She did not stop until she was at the water's edge. At the edge of the land, the edge of place and time. On the brink of infinity and eternity. The wind, blowing off the vast expanses of the unknown, was strong and salt and chill. It flattened her dress against her and sent her hair billowing out behind her. Her feet sank a little into spongy sand. Above her gulls wheeled and cried, like spirits already free of time and s.p.a.ce. For a moment she envied them.

But only for a moment. She felt no real desire this morning to escape the bonds of her mortality. Her years with the army had taught her something about the infinite preciousness of the present moment. Life was such an uncertain, such a fleeting thing, so filled with troubles and horrors and miseries-and with wonder and beauty and mystery. Like all persons, she had known her share of troubles. An almost overwhelming abundance of them had begun for her just the day following both the unhappiest and happiest day of her life, when her father had died and Major Newbury had married her. But she had survived.

She had survived!

And now-now at this most precious of moments-she was free and surrounded by such elemental beauty that her chest and her throat ached with the pain of it all. And it seemed to her that the wind blew through her rather than around her, filling her with all the mysterious spirit of life itself.

How could she fail to reach out and accept such a gift?

How could she fail to let go of the suffocating shreds of her dream and of all the misgivings about her new life that had oppressed her yesterday?

At least it was life.

And at least it was new. Ever and always new. Every day.

Lily stretched her arms out to the sides, tipped her face up to the rising sun, and twirled twice about on the sand, overwhelmed by her fleeting glimpse into the very heart of the mystery.

She was alive.

She was!

Filled with new hope, new courage, new exuberance, she set off exploring, picking her way carefully with her bare feet over the rocks at the end of the beach, reveling in the increased seclusion offered by the high cliffs to her left and the ocean to her right. Though the seclusion did not last for long. As soon as she had rounded a bend in the headland, she could see little boats bobbing on the water ahead of her and small houses and other buildings huddled at the base of the cliffs. It must be the lower village, Lower Newbury, she realized, at the bottom of that steep hill she had seen beside the inn.

Lily smiled brightly and continued on her way. She could see people up and about in the village, early as the hour must still be. Ordinary folk, like herself.

Lily was feeling happy by the time her bare feet finally took her through the gates of Newbury Abbey and onto the long driveway. She had walked up the steep hill to Upper Newbury and across the green, raising a hand in greeting to the few people she had seen. All of them, after some hesitation, had returned her gesture.

It was amazing how a new day could restore one's spirits and one's courage.

But as she was walking past the smaller lane to her left, along which she and Neville had turned the day before on their way from the church, she could see that the path was not deserted. There were two ladies walking toward her along it, not far distant. Lily stopped and smiled. They were very smartly dressed young ladies, probably guests from the house, though she did not recognize either of them.

One of them was tall and slim and dark-haired. The other was smaller and fairer and limped slightly. Both were lovely. The sight of their immaculate elegance reminded Lily of how she must look in her shabby dress and bare feet, her hair loose and curly and tangled by the wind, her complexion doubtless rosy from the air and exercise. She hesitated, about to move on. These ladies were strangers, after all.

But then, with a lurching of her stomach, she recognized the taller of the two, though her face had been veiled the day before.

And they both recognized her. That was very clear. Both stopped walking. Both looked at her with widened eyes and identical expressions of dismay. Then the taller lady came closer.

"You are Lily," she said. Ah, she was very beautiful despite the paleness of her face and the dark shadows beneath her violet eyes.

"Yes." The other lady, Lily noticed, had stiffened with obvious hostility. "And you are Lauren. Major Newbury's bride."

"Major-?" Lauren nodded with understanding. "Ah, yes-Neville. I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Lily. This is Lady Gwendoline, Lady Muir, Neville's sister."

His sister. Her own sister-in-law. Lady Gwendoline glared at her with undisguised dislike and said nothing. She stayed where she was.

Lauren's face held no such expression. Or any other either. It was a pale mask.

"I am so very sorry for what happened yesterday," Lily said-oh, the inadequacy of words. "I truly am."

"Well." Lauren's eyes, she noticed, were not quite meeting her own. "Let us look on the bright side. Better yesterday than today or tomorrow. But are you out without a companion or maid, Lily? You ought not to be. Does Neville know?"

Lily felt an overwhelming need to push past the terrible awkwardness of the meeting and to say something that would lift the blank look from the other woman's face. What a shock she must have suffered. "Oh, I have had such a wonderful morning," she told Lauren. "I went down onto the beach to watch the sun rise and then crossed the rocks out of curiosity and came to the village below. Some of the fishermen were getting ready to take their boats out, and their wives were out helping them, and their children were running about, playing. I talked with several of the people and they were so kind to me. I had breakfast with Mrs. Fundy-do you know her?-and amused her children while she fed the baby. I do not know how she manages to look after four such young children and keep her house neat all at the same time, but she does. I have made friends with them all and have promised to go back as often as I may." She laughed. "They were all funny at first and wanted to curtsy and bow to me and call me 'my lady,' Can you imagine?"

Lady Gwendoline's silence became almost loud.

Lauren's face stretched for a moment into what might have been a smile.

"But I am keeping you," Lily said, her animation fading. "I really am sorry. You are very gracious. He-Major Newbury-told me last night that he was very fond of you. I do not wonder at it. I-Well, I am sorry." She was saying all the wrong things, of course. But were there right things to say? "Do you live at Newbury Abbey?"

"At the dower house," Lauren said, nodding in the direction of the trees opposite, through which Lily could see a house just visible when she turned her head to look. "With Gwen and the countess, her mother. Perhaps I will call upon you some time. Tomorrow maybe?"

"Yes." Lily smiled, vastly relived. "I should like that, please. I should like it very much. Will you come too ... Gwendoline?" She looked uncertainly at her sister-in-law, who did not answer, but whose nostrils flared with what was clearly barely controlled anger.

Gwendoline loved her cousin, Lily thought. Her anger was understandable. She smiled fleetingly at them both before continuing on her way to the abbey. She felt considerably discomposed. Lauren was beautiful and dignified and far more gracious than she might have been expected to be. How could Neville not love her?

Some of the oppressive feeling of the day before weighed down on Lily again.

Lauren and Gwendoline stood gazing after her.

"Well!" Gwendoline expelled her breath audibly and came to stand beside her cousin as Lily moved out of earshot. "I have never been so affronted in my life. How dared she stop and talk to us-to you in particular."